Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

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EVENTS

A funny thing happened yesterday. I started seeing hits from Reddit. A *lot* of hits. Fully a fifth of my traffic came from a particular thread on Reddit — despite my being in a slow blogging period, posting my one post I managed very late in the day, and despite the long tail on my bigger posts already waning.

(In other words, by “a lot” of hits, I mean ~400. About what I’ll get from posting a video of a turtle doing something cute.)

I don’t know if you’ve seen these, but they’re setting off all sorts of wishful-thinking and conspiracy theory alarms on my bullshit detection kit. Four days after being declared not guilty of murder after having shot and killed 17-year-old unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman quickly reentered the news. CNN reports that he “stepped out of seclusion” and, happening upon the scene of a family of four having overturned their car, helped pull them from the car before it erupted into flames.

By the time a deputy arrived, Zimmerman and another man already had helped the two adults and two children out of the vehicle, Smith said.

Zimmerman did not witness the crash, and he left after making contact with the deputy, Smith said. No injuries were reported in the crash.

Only there are some minor inconsistencies with the report: that Zimmerman didn’t mention the rescue to his lawyer when they next saw one another; that the family didn’t mention a crash on social media; that the first officer on the scene was a self-described “friend” of Zimmerman even before the verdict.[Read more…]

Sharing:

The “Obama is secretly a Kenyan” conspiracy apparently just wasn’t loony enough for some people, so they had to do Orly Taitz et al one better. Universe Today reports that two self-proclaimed time travellers have leveled Very Serious Allegations about the President of the United States — specifically, that they were all involved in secret missions to teleport to Mars. Back when Barack was known as “Barry Soetero”.[Read more…]

Look at those things flying around being all super-quick and rod-like! They’ve just GOTTA be alien spacecraft! And the only explanation those stupid skeptics have is that they’re insects. Insects!

“As I reviewed one of the tapes, I noticed something streak past my camera viewfinder and thought at first it was just a bird or insect,” Escamilla told The Huffington Post.

“Looking at each frame of the footage again, I knew it was something more unusual. My wife called them ‘rods’ as they sort of looked like some kind of life form you’d see in a microscope.”

Since that time, Escamilla has collected hundreds of taped examples from around the world of these so-called rods, which vary in physical form: Some look like centipedes with appendages and others have no appendages but appear to have lights on top of them.

Skeptics maintain there’s nothing extraordinary about all of this — the objects, they say, are merely insects flying very close to the camera lens.

HAH! As though there isn’t a more reasonable explanation than INSECTS![Read more…]

Sharing:

Ed Kohout is one of THOSE kinds of trolls. The ones you know are just trolling from the get-go, but that you just have to feed anyway, just to see what levels of douchery they can realize. In my repost of “How does One Prove Astrology? By Starting Over”, our new friend Ed has taken it upon himself to go on several Gish gallops, spouting so much effluence and demi-truths at such a rate that no single human being could possibly keep up without giving up their job, their personal lives, and ridding themselves of the monkey-on-their-backs that some people call “sleeping”.

Ed has an irritating habit of, rather than merely blockquoting someone and referring to their names, instead including demeaning or degrading verbs in place of “said”. For instance, people “bleat”, “wail”, or “scramble for cover” every time they refuse to accede to his rhetorical demands. I will do likewise in each instance where I blockquote him. I will endeavor to pick the most appropriate verb for each quote (and reserve the right to verb some nouns). Sorry if it gets repetitive.

He’s ended his latest tirade with a demand that I show him one single astrology book that refers to gravity as being the source of astrology’s purported effects. To wit, Ed douched:

As for the perennial straw-man featuring gravity, Jupiter, babies and obstetricians, please cite the astrological claim that the gravity of planets determines the astrological effect.

I want a real citation of a real book, some text somewhere that makes this claim. Surely you know right where to go.

I will not partake in this thread any further until you do so.

Which is why I will reply! I’d never do anything to alienate my new friend Ed![Read more…]